This summer, I worked as a Humanities Center Student Research Partner. My faculty advisor, Professor Michael McNally, and I worked on ReligionsMN.org, a Carleton-run website that provides publicly accessible resources on religious traditions in Minnesota. The site particularly focuses on religious literacy between and about a range of faith communities. ReligionsMN has been up and running since the early 2010s and is full of work by students, scholars, and community members. The site is meant to be truly informative and tries to cater to and engage a wide swath of viewers.
My work this summer involved a number of different projects, starting with editing the work of past students. ReligionsMN has an extensive backroom catalog of projects. Over the years, students have written exhibits (multi-page, often-extensive websites) that never get edited and published. Because ReligionsMN is public-facing, it’s important that careful work is done to make sure the information published is accurate, timely, and sensitive.
Editing these sites was a new experience for me, as I had to pay careful attention to both content and wording. Humanities writing for the public should, ideally, be both easy to read and informative. It’s a different style than many students are used to writing in, since it’s different from an academic paper. Beginning my summer with editing work allowed me to get in the mindset of public-facing writing. My editing work allowed a number of exhibits to be made public for the first time. (I also edited and published an exhibit I wrote in Michael’s Global Religions in Minnesota class in fall 2023.)
As the summer progressed, I focused more on generating entirely new content for the website. Michael has been working on a two-part set of essays, meant to give readers an understanding of religion in Minnesota and the important role it’s played in the state’s history. One article focuses on religion before 1965, and the second picks moves from 1965 onward. When I started work this summer, Michael had completed the first part: “A Religious History of Minnesota to 1965.” I worked on moving this article from a Word document to ReligionsMN using Omeka, our content management system. This involved selecting photos and quotes, making decisions about how to section the article, and learning about image rights. This article is now published on ReligionsMN!
The second part of this article series is titled, as of now, “Waves of Change in the Land of 10,000 Lakes: Religious Diversity since 1965.” Excitingly, I got to work with Michael on this essay, writing and planning a section of the piece. I focused on the cultural communities that have come to Minnesota since 1965-ish, writing a series of 12 community profiles. Each profile describes why a community first came to Minnesota, the demographics of said community in the state, and the way religion has shaped the group’s experience. This work was interesting and challenging on many levels. Migration is really complicated, and it was difficult to cut its processes down to such simple language.
There’s so much more to say about my work this summer that I can’t fit into this post. This project helped me think through so much about my own goals for the future, and how my religion major plays into them.
It also taught me so much about religion in my own community, and how important religious literacy is for communication and community. Thank you so much to Michael for all the guidance this summer, and to the Humanities Center for funding this incredible research experience!